Abstract: The deployment principium of a large hoop-truss satellite antenna is studied and the mechanical analysis model and the non-probabilistic reliability model of its deployment mechanism are presented. Synthetically considering the effect of dimension errors and the space environment factors, we treat the mechanism movement as a function of some interval variables, and derive the reliability formula by using optimization. The movement reliability of the mechanism of a large satellite antenna in the whole spreading process is predicted, and the result is compared with that based on the probabilistic model, in which all variables in the movement function are seen as normal distributed random variables. The probabilistic reliability specification is about three times larger than the non-probabilistic one, and the trends of their variation are alike. Both of them agree well with the experiment, which shows that the method of this paper is reasonable and practical.

Key words: satellite antenna, hoop truss, deployment mechanism, non-probabilistic reliability